A. PANNOCCHIA, Oil painting on cardboard. Knights

Oil painting on cardboard depicting Knights
Dimensions: 55x43 cm
Works by Amleto Pannocchia (Lari, 1911 - Rome, 1987)
De Francesco Auction House presents a suite of works by the artist Amleto Pannocchia that primarily reflect his latest production. The oil works on cardboard and canvas boards showcase a mature use of the medium and mastery in discerning the numerous tonal transitions of the same color.

Numerous lots are present, including figurative ones belonging to the "polyptych" of the paladins, as well as female figures and still lifes. Some abstract lots conclude the capsule of Ampleto Pannocchia, a poetic and innovative artist with a pure and powerful language.

Ampleto Pannocchia's life is itself a work of art, swinging between the need to express himself through graphic gesture and the will to self-determine once maturity is reached. Born in Lari, the son of an anarchist cobbler and a young girl from the upper bourgeoisie, beautiful and elegant, their indissoluble love resulted in several children, with Ampleto being the firstborn during the cholera pandemic.

Later, his father went to war and returned with an even more rooted anarchist conviction. Ampleto entered the workshop, tiny, where he witnessed numerous conversations of his father and spent his youth among the shops, the port, and summers at his grandparents' house, listening to more "scholarly" conversations filled with quotes from great classics of literature. He heard, knew, and read about Orlando Furioso, Armida, and Don Quixote, attempting to give each of them characteristics drawn from the characters of his reality. Cowboys, port workers, and fruit stalls emerge, with changing colors and sharp, clean shapes more like sculptures in rocks than fluid brushstroke portraits.

His art teacher, a priest from the college he entered with reservation (due to his father's political stance) and from which he was soon expelled, saw in him the clear and pure expressive force that warmed the artistic salons of Neo-Fauvism and German Expressionism. His teacher predicted a bright future in the art world, a prediction the young Ampleto struggled to believe. But the creative drive was undoubtedly strong in him, causing a true pictorial emergency that led him to represent the reality around him, even with chalk on the sidewalks of the city of Lari.

One day, dirty and messy but completely absorbed in his works, he locked eyes with a blonde and graceful girl, elegant, who lingered on his works, appreciating their characteristics. That encounter, which did not result in a real acquaintance for a long time, instilled in him a new determination to emerge. He worked as a lithographer at Belforte's workshop under the guidance of Zanacchini, a famous engraver. Unsatisfied, he started his period of moral wandering, moving from a marriage without conviction to assignments at Cinecittà, both as a set designer and an actor.

While in Rome, he met again the love of his adolescence, but this time she had a name, Mirella. They never parted again. The most mature artistic phase begins, with confrontations with gallery owners and the art market of the upper-class Rome of the early 1970s stimulating his anarchic past. His artistic production enriched itself with true polyptychs, created around a theme. We know "the Crusaders," the "paladins," and finally, from 1973, that of the "red battle." His pictorial production spans three fundamental colors: red, green, and blue, which sometimes blend depending on the subject to be portrayed. In his polyptychs, there are not only knights and figures from ancient and modern mythology but also inhabitants and patrons of taverns, ports, and markets. Simple girls, students, and dancers.